Deadly violence rose again in Costa Rica in 2017,
continuing a sustained increase seen over the past few
years.

While Costa Rica's security situation is far better
than its neighbors, homicides are at levels the country has
never seen before.

Drugs and drug trafficking have been blamed for the
increased violence, and it's not clear the government can mount
an effective response.

Homicides in Costa Rica hit a record level in 2017, as 603 people
were killed - 25 more than the 578 homicides in 2016, a record at
the time.

This continues a climb seen since 2012, when there were 407
killings.

Costa Rica, home to about 5 million people, closed 2017 with a
homicide rate of 12.1 per 100,000 people. While that is just a
fraction of the homicide rates in Central
America's Northern Triangle - Guatemala, 26.1 homicides per
100,000 people; Honduras, 42.8 per 100,000; and El Salvador, 60
per 100,000 - it is the highest that Costa Rica has ever seen and
more than double the rate registered in the US.

Central America is among the most violent regions in the
world, and much of the violence is related to gangs and
drug-related crime. While the security situation in Costa Rica is
much different than other countries in the region, many of the
killings there during the past year were attributed to drugs and
drug trafficking.

Michael Soto, the deputy director
of Costa Rica's judicial investigation body, said 48% of the deaths stemmed
from gang violence, while 25% were related to drug trafficking.
Fights and other causes, like domestic violence, led to the rest.
Seventy-two percent of the homicides were committed with firearms, the most common
cause.

"Poor neighborhoods have problems
with crime and violence but not [a] significant organized gang
presence," Geoff Thale, program director at the Washington Office
on Latin America, told Business Insider. "So I think in the Costa
Rica context, it mostly is drug trafficking and the effects of
fights over trafficking routes and control of trafficking
routes."

Most illegal drugs smuggled into
the US travel through Mexico after making their way through
Central America. Costa Rica and its neighbors have long been
transshipment points for drugs heading north, and the increase in
homicides appears to be centered in areas where drug activity has
increased - namely, urban areas and areas along the
coasts.

Nearly three-quarters of Costa
Rica's homicides in 2017 were concentrated in three of the
country's seven provinces.

Four hundred and twenty five
homicides, or 71% of the total, took place in San Jose, which
includes the capital city of the same name; Limon, which covers
the entire Caribbean coast; and Alajuela, which abuts the
northern border.

Other countries have seen more intense transshipment activity,
but Coast Rica has seen a big increase in such movement, Thale
told Business Insider.

"Along the Atlantic coast, stuff comes in ... and along the
route, along the coastline in particular, there's trafficking
organizations operating," Thale said.

"And there's lots local conflict over who controls the route or
who pays who off and stuff," he added. "Even though most of that
is a flow north, there's a spillover effect in the cities, San
Jose in particular."

Costa Rican security officials have said they are not able to
stop drug traffickers from making use of their territory.

"There does not exist a beach in Costa Rica where narcos haven't
penetrated with a boat with cocaine, coming from Colombia,"
Public Security Minister Gustavo Mata told legislators in February
2017.

Mata also pointed to an increase in marijuana trafficked by
Jamaican groups, who, he said, worked with Costa Ricans in Limon
province. "That situation caused much of the homicides that there
were" in 2016, he said.

Mata said in December that the
country hadn't taken measures to confront the wave of drugs being
trafficked through Costa Rica and that the country was seeing
full-fledged "narcotrafficking," rather than "narcomenudeo" and
"microtrafico" - terms for small-scale or street-level drug
sales.

Costa Rican coast-guard officials
said in mid-2017 that the number of suspected drug-trafficking
boats detected in the country's waters doubled between 2013 and
2016, with the majority spotted in near southern Pacific coast.
One coast guard official compared the activity to "a plague."

"A lot of that stuff you see
going into Costa Rica, that's when they first track it, and then
it'll take these short hops up the coast, whichever coast it's
on," Adam Isacson, WOLA's senior associate for defense oversight,
told Business Insider in late 2017, describing trafficking routes
detected by US authorities in 2016.

"Just like a little ant going up
and up the coast in little hops and then probably getting into
Mexico, where it'll start going overland," Isacson said.

Some of the drugs being
trafficked through Costa Rica travel overland routes, said Mike
Allison, a University of Scranton political-science professor who
has done research in the region.

That movement "leads to
corruption and the buying off of police and border-patrol agents
and perhaps to threats of the killing of those who ... won't
accept bribes," he told Business Insider.

'It's likely this curve will keep going up'

Authorities in Costa Rica have warned for some time that the
country's violence was directly linked to drugs.

Seventy percent of the 570 homicides in 2015 were reportedly
the result of fighting between
drug groups. In late 2016, Costa Rican authorities dismantled a drug-trafficking
network linked to the Sinaloa cartel. The Zetas and Gulf cartels
are also reportedly present in the region.

The country's attorney general - who previously warned that Mexican cartels
were arming Costa Rican gangs - said last year that Mexican
cartels were recruiting local criminals, training them in Mexico,
and returning them to Costa Rica to apply cartel tactics.

"We have an increase in violence because local drug trafficking
organizations are applying the Mexican strategy of controlling
territory," the attorney general, Jorge Chavarria, said in February 2017.

caption

A police officer stands guard in front of a site for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) summit in Heredia province, Costa Rica, January 27, 2015.

source

REUTERS/Juan Carlos Ulate

The "Mexican recipe," as Chavarria
described it last summer, led to local gangs - driven by a
greater supply of drugs - to focus on supplying local
consumption, which in turn led to violent attempts to monopolize
the local market.

"I imagine we're seeing ... that people are being paid in drugs,"
Allison said, "and so [you] see an increase in ... drug
availability and use in Costa Rica and elsewhere, as ... they pay
off the people simply by providing them drugs."

Walter Espinoza, the chief of the judicial investigation body,
said in late December that killings of criminal leaders could led
to further violence, as those groups fight over leadership and
control of territory - a phenomenon seen in Mexico as a result of
the Kingpin anti-crime strategy.

"In recent years we do not remember a situation like that which
we are experiencing," Espinoza told the press in December. There
have been recent reports of communities near
San Jose being controlled by criminal groups, who extort
businesses operating there.

Costa Rica has reduced police training in
order to deploy more officers (less training may make those
officers more susceptible to bribery)
and partnered with neighbors to combat
organized crime. Costa Rica's police also flew more than 3,400 hours of surveillance
flights over the country's coasts, mountains, and communities, in
2017, and next year the country's coast guard will acquire two
110-foot patrol ships donated by the US.

caption

A man sells fruits and vegetables in San Jose, July 20, 2015. The words on the banner over the stand read, "Thank you, Lord, to fight those who fight against me — Isaiah 49:25."

source

REUTERS/Juan Carlos Ulate

The latest evidence of a sustained increase in violence in Costa
Rica comes as the country prepares for February 4 elections that
will select the president, first and second vice president, and
57 members of the legislature.

The timing has reinvigorated debate about how to approach
insecurity, whether through "mano dura" policies
popular elsewhere in the region or with other, more comprehensive
policies that address violence as a result of social conditions,
like increasing inequality over the last two decades.

Surveys in the final months of 2017 put security as the fourth most pressing concern
among Costa Ricans, behind unemployment, corruption, and the
economy - but ahead of poverty. Seven presidential candidates
held a debate in a prison in November,
focusing on issues in criminal justice and crime-fighting. ("I
hope you feel at home," one prisoner told the candidates.)

However security concerns factor into the voting in February, and
into the potential runoff in April, crime and violence look set
to remain problems in Costa Rica.

"Since 2012, we have seen an increase, and it's likely this curve
will keep going up unless something extraordinary happens," Soto,
of the judicial investigation body, said earlier this month. But,
he stressed, "we are not losing control, and we are at the same
level as in other societies."